so today has been all about educate
and I’m gonna talk about failure and as
has already been shared
I’ve had a fir set of failures in my
life has anybody here never had a
failure the Casey’s two people here how
do we feel about failure we’re
comfortable we like it do we go you know
what today I am gonna fail we don’t do
that we never go out deliberately to
fail I have an assertion here that in
the school of tomorrow failure is really
really important and we need to set out
to fail and I have a few reflections
here in these slides and over the next
10 minutes to talk about how we fail
safely and how we manage our body
chemistry around failure because the
body reacts to failure and success in a
different way so you know how does it
feel how does have a success feel just
visualize that in your mind for a moment
success feels good doesn’t it it’s like
it’s like a drug I did it today I
knocked it out of the park I hustled I
made it happen I got it out there
I failed failed it’s not good and what
do we do to kids in our schools today
what do we do to kids over exams entry
tests homework you failed you didn’t get
through that exam go to a bad school now
you see you were successful go to a
grammar school as is currently in vogue
my personal belief is that everybody has
talents can do amazing things whether
they’re a child or an adult my other
belief is that in the world that we live
in now continuous learning is going to
be the thing that defines us
so from cradle to grave we will keep
learning
we’ll be educated for our entire life
and to get that kind of education
we need to think about how the school of
tomorrow spans across our entire life
and somebody very famous in government
clearly once said education education
education and I’m going to say we don’t
need no education we need something
different you need to change the way we
learn and we need to leverage new skills
and new new muscles and we need to learn
more from failing so the title of my
talk is failing to learn and the good
thing about this talk is if I fail to
get anything across to you I will have
succeeded and if you learn something
today I will have succeeded so this
isn’t zero risk for me so I’m feeling
good so failing to learn when I was at
school doing my a-levels and this is
about four hundred years ago I’m not
older I did for my a-levels maths
further maths physics and chemistry so
you’re thinking don’t invite him to our
parties we really don’t want him to come
along we thought he was fun when he came
on now we know his a-level subjects
that’s bad and I had a teacher and the
teacher was called mr. Anderson not this
mr. Anderson a different mr. Anderson so
mr. Anderson you’re all thinking now in
your minds he was inspirational he was
the one he was neo he took the right
pill whether it’s the blue or the red I
can never remember but he went down into
the matrix and bought the agents with
the bullets jumping around downloading
jiu-jitsu into his mind mr. Anderson in
my world was not near he was not the one
but he did set me on my path with some
things that he did and he created
failure for me with chemistry and I’ve
been scarred for my entire life so this
is mr. Anderson my mr. Anderson and we
called him Scully not to his face
clearly but we called him Scully because
he looked a little bit like this and his
if children were children were an
unnecessary addition to the whole
chemical curriculum and that they were
there to learn about alkanes and alkenes
and hydroxyl ions and organic chemistry
all this horrible horrible stuff and I
have loved chemistry I love chemistry as
a GCSE student when we couldn’t make
things when create things so poor old
skully and probably is not on this
planet anymore maybe looking down and
it’s right now thinking there’s Keene I
said he was a failure
poor Scully really really upset me and I
was a little rebellious at the time I
formed a punk band I was into comic
books Dungeons and Dragons
you might remember those old games and
things that we played and I was
generally a little difficult to deal
with mr. Anderson found it hard to deal
with me and mr. Anderson was probably
thinking this is before the matrix if we
were playing the matrix story out here
he was thinking I don’t like that agent
there he’s kind of fighting me but this
is not I have to fight him and I refused
to do the revision timetable that mr.
Anderson setters so at that point he
said this is how he will revise this is
what’s right for you this is how you
will follow through and we fought over
this not like neo in the matrix but we
fought there was this battle going on so
mr. Anderson knife fell out I then left
school I did my a-levels I moved on he
set me away from chemistry which was my
first love I loved chemistry and I also
loved art in my GCSEs mr. Anderson cured
me of that and I went off to do
programming instead which was one of my
other loves and the interesting thing
there is mr. Anderson also turned me off
education and he caused me to fail at
education and the reason that mr.
Anderson caused me to fail is this
picture here so when I’d done my GCSEs I
was firmly in this middle segment here
and diagram I could see art and I could
see science and like neo I could bring
them together and I could see the wonder
of the two working together creativity
and science and data coming together to
do things I can still remember in school
as part of my education having to choose
my a-levels and being mortified that I
did not have the choice to do physics
maths and art which was what I wanted to
do and the head teacher at the time and
went to speak to him said no you’re
either a scientist or you’re an artist
you will fail if you try to be both so
another failure I failed at opening a
comic book store and never won at D&D
particularly never got to a high level I
failed with Scully in the chemistry
tests but when I left school I decided
that’s it universities not for me and I
went to become an apprentice programmer
and I joined a company called royal
insurance in Liverpool where I’m from
and I spent the next two years failing
and I loved it I absolutely loved it
I learned something from it so I was
learning system/370 IBM mainframe
assembly language which is really hard
really low-level machine code in big old
clunky mainframes bigger than this room
very hot and what I would do in the
thing that I’d found my passion to be
would be I would do support and I would
do overnight support as a 19 year old
this was great I had a motorcycle I
could go through the mers of tunnel
I like midnight go into an office with
green screens everywhere a little like
the matrix Wonder and cup of coffee in
hand and fix broken computer programs
and those broken computer programs when
I would get into the office
the operators would have printed them
off and there’d be a huge stack of paper
there you’d have to work through and
you’d have to fix them and I loved that
failure
I loved fixing that failure I loved the
iteration of it I loved working through
and I started to get hooked on it in my
career and it’s interesting now I’m
working at Google I see how Google uses
failure internally and how we manage
failure and I never knew any of this
theory and the psychological therapy
theory behind managing failure but the
psychological theory that we use now at
Google is called growth mindset so what
we try to do with our teams as were
coaching colleagues as we’re working
together is to adopt a growth mindset so
for any of you have not come across this
technique before the idea is that you
think about the effort you put in how
you moved forward and what you learned
from failure not about did you manage to
close that deal yes or no binary were
you successful or where you were failure
because the body has a chemical reaction
to success so when you’re successful
your body releases testosterone and we
have something called the winner effect
so all of the studies that have been
done on winning and losing are that if
you win regularly you become better at
winning come up with a logic to that and
boxers use this so when boxers fight
other boxers first of all they fight
people who they will definitely beat and
they get better by doing that it’s not
just muscles there’s a psychological
process of testosterone being released
and dopamine then going into the brain
and building up their connections it’s
an addiction it’s a chemical addiction
similar to a lot of other things out
there that make you feel good cocaine
sex all those other kind of things all
those are the great things in life no a
lot of other things in life give you
that head failure releases a different
set of chemicals so one of the tricks
here with growth mindset is how do you
get the body to release positive
chemicals when you fail and as you fail
and growth mindset is the key to
managing that camera
balance and managing the way that it
works understanding the challenges of
the things that help you grow
understanding that actually effort are
the things that build your muscles so
you know you think about lifting weights
in a gym lifting weights in a gym only
works if you do it a lot you build the
muscle the brain is a muscle try fail
try fail try fail eventually you succeed
so creating an environment with adults
with your teams that you work with with
colleagues with friends with family with
children around growth mindset and
around pushing people into areas of
failure but not too far is critical and
as we talk about what types of failure
we should think about there are seven
types that I want you to take away from
this here are the 7 types of failure you
probably don’t often see slides like
that seven types of failure we’re gonna
tell you about today do none of these
actually know there’s one that it’s
really really good catastrophic failure
is bad okay
do not do catastrophic failure
catastrophic failure is kind of like you
know well you can imagine I’m sure I’m
not going to say describe catastrophic
things and the one here that’s really
really safe an interesting is fast cheap
and safe okay
and I’m going to ask you all to take a
vow at the end of this session about
adopting some fast cheap and safe
failure strategies let’s talk briefly
about the others
failure of others if you watch other
people in a classroom fail you will feel
superior go yeah they failed I didn’t
fail you don’t get the same chemical
engagement if you see somebody on a
video or in TV fail you don’t learn from
it so actually experiencing the failure
and turning it into a positive positive
experience and a positive positive
chemical reaction that’s not about
superiority versus inferiority is really
important so as you’re working with
teams of people with children etc how do
you help every
I have moments of failure in a safe
positive way that helps them be on a
journey to somewhere historical failure
is what we often do say ok here is an
out Business School here’s a case study
this is how somebody failed in the past
managing a particular business great
I’ve learned that tick I filed it in the
brain in the same way that mr. Andersen
would have tried to get me to learn
alkanes and alkenes I filed it in the
brain under knowledge that I can pull
back it’s not a muscle memory I don’t
know how to do that so finding ways to
avoid others failing and historical
failure is key which is where we come to
this fast cheap and safe other things on
the bottom I really wouldn’t go there
they can be positive not great big
companies tend to go into slow expensive
and dangerous failure often politicians
and governments also go into slow
expensive and dangerous failure creeping
failure is something that actually
you’re not really quite noticing it’s
happening and you’re slowly creeping
towards failure catastrophic failure
clearly is you know very very bad and
you don’t want to go there that’s where
people die and it’s not good and passive
failure is where you don’t even notice
that you’re failing nobody realizes
you’re pumping bad chemicals into the
atmosphere and nobody has noticed so
from all of these types of failure
parking your brain fast cheap and safe
failure for kids for adults for teams
for businesses etc and then start to
park that around this framework here so
how we get to success through growth
mindset is by saying and acknowledging
to ourselves and creating an environment
where we know that we are going to keep
trying and that there is no fail as Yoda
or somebody said we keep failing we keep
trying and this is like a scientific
experiment we’re inching forward towards
success
so each failure that safe
that’s reasonably cheap that doesn’t
bankrupt you is a step towards success
acknowledge that success say great we’ve
made one more step forward
it may take ten thousand failures before
you hit that success but that’s going to
be a big success for you so adopting a
growth mindset this framework of
repeated trying to grow ideation to kill
off quickly ideas that are not working
so you don’t get into the slow long and
dangerous cycle and to move whatever it
is you’re doing forward is critical to
the way to success and at the heart of
that is celebrating failure celebrate
failure celebrate effort well done
everybody
this didn’t work out but this is what we
learned from it
celebrate with children celebrate with
teams do not penalize them you penalize
them you shut down their risk-taking so
finally I’m going to ask everybody can
you all just raise your whatever hand
you want to raise here so I promise I
promise that I will take some safe cheap
and fast risks
[Music]
once a week for the next month
okay what I’d like you to do is to
schedule an hour per week to do
something that you think will fail okay
I want you to come up with a big problem
and apply some different thinking that
you think isn’t going to work and see
what you learn from it
see how that failure can transform and
celebrate that failure and go that was
pretty good it failed but you know I
feel good because we’ve moved forward
we’ve taken one step forward on the path
to success thank you very much for lyft
listening and I hope you all fail thank
you
[Applause]
and I’m gonna talk about failure and as
has already been shared
I’ve had a fir set of failures in my
life has anybody here never had a
failure the Casey’s two people here how
do we feel about failure we’re
comfortable we like it do we go you know
what today I am gonna fail we don’t do
that we never go out deliberately to
fail I have an assertion here that in
the school of tomorrow failure is really
really important and we need to set out
to fail and I have a few reflections
here in these slides and over the next
10 minutes to talk about how we fail
safely and how we manage our body
chemistry around failure because the
body reacts to failure and success in a
different way so you know how does it
feel how does have a success feel just
visualize that in your mind for a moment
success feels good doesn’t it it’s like
it’s like a drug I did it today I
knocked it out of the park I hustled I
made it happen I got it out there
I failed failed it’s not good and what
do we do to kids in our schools today
what do we do to kids over exams entry
tests homework you failed you didn’t get
through that exam go to a bad school now
you see you were successful go to a
grammar school as is currently in vogue
my personal belief is that everybody has
talents can do amazing things whether
they’re a child or an adult my other
belief is that in the world that we live
in now continuous learning is going to
be the thing that defines us
so from cradle to grave we will keep
learning
we’ll be educated for our entire life
and to get that kind of education
we need to think about how the school of
tomorrow spans across our entire life
and somebody very famous in government
clearly once said education education
education and I’m going to say we don’t
need no education we need something
different you need to change the way we
learn and we need to leverage new skills
and new new muscles and we need to learn
more from failing so the title of my
talk is failing to learn and the good
thing about this talk is if I fail to
get anything across to you I will have
succeeded and if you learn something
today I will have succeeded so this
isn’t zero risk for me so I’m feeling
good so failing to learn when I was at
school doing my a-levels and this is
about four hundred years ago I’m not
older I did for my a-levels maths
further maths physics and chemistry so
you’re thinking don’t invite him to our
parties we really don’t want him to come
along we thought he was fun when he came
on now we know his a-level subjects
that’s bad and I had a teacher and the
teacher was called mr. Anderson not this
mr. Anderson a different mr. Anderson so
mr. Anderson you’re all thinking now in
your minds he was inspirational he was
the one he was neo he took the right
pill whether it’s the blue or the red I
can never remember but he went down into
the matrix and bought the agents with
the bullets jumping around downloading
jiu-jitsu into his mind mr. Anderson in
my world was not near he was not the one
but he did set me on my path with some
things that he did and he created
failure for me with chemistry and I’ve
been scarred for my entire life so this
is mr. Anderson my mr. Anderson and we
called him Scully not to his face
clearly but we called him Scully because
he looked a little bit like this and his
if children were children were an
unnecessary addition to the whole
chemical curriculum and that they were
there to learn about alkanes and alkenes
and hydroxyl ions and organic chemistry
all this horrible horrible stuff and I
have loved chemistry I love chemistry as
a GCSE student when we couldn’t make
things when create things so poor old
skully and probably is not on this
planet anymore maybe looking down and
it’s right now thinking there’s Keene I
said he was a failure
poor Scully really really upset me and I
was a little rebellious at the time I
formed a punk band I was into comic
books Dungeons and Dragons
you might remember those old games and
things that we played and I was
generally a little difficult to deal
with mr. Anderson found it hard to deal
with me and mr. Anderson was probably
thinking this is before the matrix if we
were playing the matrix story out here
he was thinking I don’t like that agent
there he’s kind of fighting me but this
is not I have to fight him and I refused
to do the revision timetable that mr.
Anderson setters so at that point he
said this is how he will revise this is
what’s right for you this is how you
will follow through and we fought over
this not like neo in the matrix but we
fought there was this battle going on so
mr. Anderson knife fell out I then left
school I did my a-levels I moved on he
set me away from chemistry which was my
first love I loved chemistry and I also
loved art in my GCSEs mr. Anderson cured
me of that and I went off to do
programming instead which was one of my
other loves and the interesting thing
there is mr. Anderson also turned me off
education and he caused me to fail at
education and the reason that mr.
Anderson caused me to fail is this
picture here so when I’d done my GCSEs I
was firmly in this middle segment here
and diagram I could see art and I could
see science and like neo I could bring
them together and I could see the wonder
of the two working together creativity
and science and data coming together to
do things I can still remember in school
as part of my education having to choose
my a-levels and being mortified that I
did not have the choice to do physics
maths and art which was what I wanted to
do and the head teacher at the time and
went to speak to him said no you’re
either a scientist or you’re an artist
you will fail if you try to be both so
another failure I failed at opening a
comic book store and never won at D&D
particularly never got to a high level I
failed with Scully in the chemistry
tests but when I left school I decided
that’s it universities not for me and I
went to become an apprentice programmer
and I joined a company called royal
insurance in Liverpool where I’m from
and I spent the next two years failing
and I loved it I absolutely loved it
I learned something from it so I was
learning system/370 IBM mainframe
assembly language which is really hard
really low-level machine code in big old
clunky mainframes bigger than this room
very hot and what I would do in the
thing that I’d found my passion to be
would be I would do support and I would
do overnight support as a 19 year old
this was great I had a motorcycle I
could go through the mers of tunnel
I like midnight go into an office with
green screens everywhere a little like
the matrix Wonder and cup of coffee in
hand and fix broken computer programs
and those broken computer programs when
I would get into the office
the operators would have printed them
off and there’d be a huge stack of paper
there you’d have to work through and
you’d have to fix them and I loved that
failure
I loved fixing that failure I loved the
iteration of it I loved working through
and I started to get hooked on it in my
career and it’s interesting now I’m
working at Google I see how Google uses
failure internally and how we manage
failure and I never knew any of this
theory and the psychological therapy
theory behind managing failure but the
psychological theory that we use now at
Google is called growth mindset so what
we try to do with our teams as were
coaching colleagues as we’re working
together is to adopt a growth mindset so
for any of you have not come across this
technique before the idea is that you
think about the effort you put in how
you moved forward and what you learned
from failure not about did you manage to
close that deal yes or no binary were
you successful or where you were failure
because the body has a chemical reaction
to success so when you’re successful
your body releases testosterone and we
have something called the winner effect
so all of the studies that have been
done on winning and losing are that if
you win regularly you become better at
winning come up with a logic to that and
boxers use this so when boxers fight
other boxers first of all they fight
people who they will definitely beat and
they get better by doing that it’s not
just muscles there’s a psychological
process of testosterone being released
and dopamine then going into the brain
and building up their connections it’s
an addiction it’s a chemical addiction
similar to a lot of other things out
there that make you feel good cocaine
sex all those other kind of things all
those are the great things in life no a
lot of other things in life give you
that head failure releases a different
set of chemicals so one of the tricks
here with growth mindset is how do you
get the body to release positive
chemicals when you fail and as you fail
and growth mindset is the key to
managing that camera
balance and managing the way that it
works understanding the challenges of
the things that help you grow
understanding that actually effort are
the things that build your muscles so
you know you think about lifting weights
in a gym lifting weights in a gym only
works if you do it a lot you build the
muscle the brain is a muscle try fail
try fail try fail eventually you succeed
so creating an environment with adults
with your teams that you work with with
colleagues with friends with family with
children around growth mindset and
around pushing people into areas of
failure but not too far is critical and
as we talk about what types of failure
we should think about there are seven
types that I want you to take away from
this here are the 7 types of failure you
probably don’t often see slides like
that seven types of failure we’re gonna
tell you about today do none of these
actually know there’s one that it’s
really really good catastrophic failure
is bad okay
do not do catastrophic failure
catastrophic failure is kind of like you
know well you can imagine I’m sure I’m
not going to say describe catastrophic
things and the one here that’s really
really safe an interesting is fast cheap
and safe okay
and I’m going to ask you all to take a
vow at the end of this session about
adopting some fast cheap and safe
failure strategies let’s talk briefly
about the others
failure of others if you watch other
people in a classroom fail you will feel
superior go yeah they failed I didn’t
fail you don’t get the same chemical
engagement if you see somebody on a
video or in TV fail you don’t learn from
it so actually experiencing the failure
and turning it into a positive positive
experience and a positive positive
chemical reaction that’s not about
superiority versus inferiority is really
important so as you’re working with
teams of people with children etc how do
you help every
I have moments of failure in a safe
positive way that helps them be on a
journey to somewhere historical failure
is what we often do say ok here is an
out Business School here’s a case study
this is how somebody failed in the past
managing a particular business great
I’ve learned that tick I filed it in the
brain in the same way that mr. Andersen
would have tried to get me to learn
alkanes and alkenes I filed it in the
brain under knowledge that I can pull
back it’s not a muscle memory I don’t
know how to do that so finding ways to
avoid others failing and historical
failure is key which is where we come to
this fast cheap and safe other things on
the bottom I really wouldn’t go there
they can be positive not great big
companies tend to go into slow expensive
and dangerous failure often politicians
and governments also go into slow
expensive and dangerous failure creeping
failure is something that actually
you’re not really quite noticing it’s
happening and you’re slowly creeping
towards failure catastrophic failure
clearly is you know very very bad and
you don’t want to go there that’s where
people die and it’s not good and passive
failure is where you don’t even notice
that you’re failing nobody realizes
you’re pumping bad chemicals into the
atmosphere and nobody has noticed so
from all of these types of failure
parking your brain fast cheap and safe
failure for kids for adults for teams
for businesses etc and then start to
park that around this framework here so
how we get to success through growth
mindset is by saying and acknowledging
to ourselves and creating an environment
where we know that we are going to keep
trying and that there is no fail as Yoda
or somebody said we keep failing we keep
trying and this is like a scientific
experiment we’re inching forward towards
success
so each failure that safe
that’s reasonably cheap that doesn’t
bankrupt you is a step towards success
acknowledge that success say great we’ve
made one more step forward
it may take ten thousand failures before
you hit that success but that’s going to
be a big success for you so adopting a
growth mindset this framework of
repeated trying to grow ideation to kill
off quickly ideas that are not working
so you don’t get into the slow long and
dangerous cycle and to move whatever it
is you’re doing forward is critical to
the way to success and at the heart of
that is celebrating failure celebrate
failure celebrate effort well done
everybody
this didn’t work out but this is what we
learned from it
celebrate with children celebrate with
teams do not penalize them you penalize
them you shut down their risk-taking so
finally I’m going to ask everybody can
you all just raise your whatever hand
you want to raise here so I promise I
promise that I will take some safe cheap
and fast risks
[Music]
once a week for the next month
okay what I’d like you to do is to
schedule an hour per week to do
something that you think will fail okay
I want you to come up with a big problem
and apply some different thinking that
you think isn’t going to work and see
what you learn from it
see how that failure can transform and
celebrate that failure and go that was
pretty good it failed but you know I
feel good because we’ve moved forward
we’ve taken one step forward on the path
to success thank you very much for lyft
listening and I hope you all fail thank
you
[Applause]
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